iPhone software: the community hacks, Apple improves

It’s been a heckuva few weeks for iPhone devs, has it not? We’ve gone all the way from the crushing depression of knowing we’d have to play within the web sandbox, to the first hints of compiled goodness, to this — the first true, native 3rd party app with useful functionality. As the name implies, MobileTerminal is a terminal emulator (and yes, it does actually install a new icon on the home screen) that should let the more 1337 among us execute arbitrary commands to their portable bundles of Mac OS X joy; as the Google Code page astutely notes, it’s not a telnet or ssh client, though an ssh client can be fired up from the terminal. The code is open and development seems to be going fast and furious, so keep an eye out for updates, like, hourly!

But wait, there’s more: it turns out Apple covertly sneaked in some goodies of its own when it rolled out the nebulously-described 1.01 firmware earlier this week. Uncle Walt himself discovered that the Phone app’s Favorites tab has been upped from 20 entries to a more usable 50, the option to BCC yourself when sending email has been added, and a number of external audio devices with iPod docks that the iPhone previously rejected are now miraculously working, it seems. So much for “bug fixes” only, eh, Apple?